Nor should we forget, when considering this legend, that story of
Herne the Hunter, who

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
_Merry Wives of Windsor_, act. iv, sc. 4.

And even yet, in various parts of England, the story of some great
man, generally a member of one of the county families, who drives
about the country at night, is common. Thus, in Warwickshire, it is
the 'One-handed Boughton', who drives about in his coach and six, and
makes the benighted traveller hold gates open for him; or it is 'Lady
Skipwith', who passes through the country at night in the same
manner. This subject might be pursued to much greater length, for
popular tradition is full of such stories; but enough has been said
to show how the awful presence of a glorious God can be converted
into a gloomy superstition; and, at the same time, how the majesty of
the old belief strives to rescue itself by clinging, in the popular
consciousness, to some king or hero, as Arthur or Waldemar, or,
failing that, to some squire's family, as Hackelberend, or the 'one-
handed Boughton', or even to the Keeper Herne.

Odin and the Aesir then were dispossessed and degraded by our Saviour
and his Apostles, just as they had of old thrown out the Frost
Giants, and the two are mingled together, in medieval Norse